Rogeting: why 'sinister buttocks' are creeping into students' essays

In an attempt to get away with plagiarising their work, unscrupulous students are using a thesaurus app to ring the changes on essays copy-and-pasted from the internet. The results are often hilariously inept

Any one of those, yes. OK. Very well. As you wish. It is the practice of students replacing words and phrases in essays they have copied from the internet with supposedly synonymous alternatives in order to disguise their plagiarism.

These students are idiots. Morons. Dunces. Block/bone/pinheads. Derbrains. 'Nanas. "Even if the sentence had made sense it seemed out of place in [a paper on] business information systems and I was motivated to seek out the source," Sadler said.

Is he actually Rogeting as he speaks? No – all business information systems lecturers sound a bit like that.

Well, set a bandit, crook, pilferer, plunderer to catch a larcener, criminal, defalcator, cheat I suppose. He has entered his favourite Rogetism in the annual competition held by the Times Higher Education Supplement to find the most grievous, glaring, atrocious, egregious exam mistakes.

Which is? "Sinister buttocks".

What was that in its original incarnation? Let me guess … scary bum from "frightening tramp"? No, I've got nothing. It's a freeform restyling of the simple phrase "left behind."

Idiots. Morons. Dunces. Et cetera. And so on. And so forth. "[There's] no attempt to understand either the source or target text," says Sadler.